I'm not sure if this is the right place to start this thread, but I'll give it a go anyway. First, I want to give you some background on my situation before I get into details of the problem. I am an application support engineer for an industrial automation distributor. I help customers with their software and hardware components to make sure they are getting the results they need. Recently a customer of mine purchased new Dell Latitude D620 laptop PCs running Windows XP Pro. I also have a D620 laptop. The customer is running some older 16 bit application software, some of which I also have installed on my PC. On my laptop, everything runs just fine. My customer is experiencing two issues. First, when you run the application software and try to do a File:Open, the file manager that pops up does not show any files within the current folder and does not show the full folder tree. Thiss is true of 3 different applications made by 3 different software manufacturers (so it's not a problem central to one software company).

The second issue they are encountering is that these 16 bit applications transfer data usings your standard RS232 serial port. However, when you tell the software to transfer data, the software gives a message that there are no COM ports available. (I have checked with 2 of the 3 16 bit applications they are running). I have done everything I could think of, including shutting down other programs running in the background, to ensure that the COM ports are available, but have had no luck.

Since I am not in front of their PC's to do a lot of troubleshooting, I guess my purpose here is to ask this one overriding question of you all:

Could both the file browsing from the application software and the COM port problems both be a result of 16 bit applications running in a 32 bit environment? Any help is greatly appreciated.